1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a path management control technique.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, there have been suggested various network bandwidth advance reservation services for a user to securely obtain bandwidth of a network, and also for a network service provider to utilize resources of a network. There is disclosed in the following non-patent document 1 a method of how to handle a problem that such an advance reservation request is failure or denied. There is disclosed in the following non-patent document 2 a technique of adjusting schedules of such an advance reservation request, taking account of prediction of a traffic tendency and a network state.    [Non-patent Document 1]: Jun Zheng, et. al., “Toward Automated Provisioning of Advance Reservation Service in Next-Generation Optical Internet,” IEEE Communications Magazine, November 2006.    [Non-patent Document 2]: Dirk Hetzer, Ilka Miloucheva, and Karl Jonas, “Resource Reservation in Advance for content On-demand Services,” NETWORKS 2006.
However, the technique disclosed in the non-patent document 1 makes a user to change a content of his or her request so that his or her bandwidth reservation will be accepted. The technique disclosed in the non-patent document 2 does not consider how to handle a case in which a user cannot make an advance bandwidth reservation as the user desires.
The present invention has an object to solve the above problems by providing a path management control for facilitating a user's advance bandwidth reservation (setting of an advance reserved path) as the user desires.